Beauvais Cathedral

Interesting facts

Vérité's astronomical clock contains about 90,000 steel and brass parts and 52 enamel dials on its front.

The clock cabinet is 12 metres tall and over 5 metres wide, styled in a Romano-Byzantine manner.

Dozens of automata enact a Last Judgment, with a crowing rooster, trumpeting angels, Virtue led to heaven and Vice pushed to hell.

The clock was first exhibited in Paris at the Palace of Industry in 1869 before being installed in the cathedral in 1876.

The cathedral's 14th-century chiming clock is considered possibly the oldest fully preserved working mechanical clock in Europe.

The choir's original four-part vaults were rebuilt as six-part vaults after the collapse of 1284.

Seventy-five of the cathedral's historic windows were removed and hidden away for safety during the Second World War.

The choir vault rises higher than the nave of St Peter's Basilica in Rome, which reaches about 46 metres.

After the second collapse, construction on the cathedral finally stopped around 1600.

Why it is worth it

Beauvais Cathedral is the most daring building of the Gothic age and, fittingly, an unfinished one. Its choir vault stands about 48 metres above the floor, the highest Gothic vault ever built, and walking into it from the low streets of the town is the whole point of a visit. What stands today is only the choir, begun in 1225 under count-bishop Milo of Nanteuil, and a transept added in the 16th century. The nave was never built: the space where it should be is still occupied by the Basse Œuvre, a surviving fragment of the modest 10th-century cathedral that the Gothic giant was meant to replace.

The story is one of ambition outrunning engineering. The choir was completed in 1272, and in 1284 part of its vault came down. The builders reconstructed it at the same height but with extra piers and a denser, six-part vault. Work resumed on the transept around 1500 under the master mason Martin Chambiges; in 1569 a crossing tower with a stone spire was completed that reached about 153 metres, briefly making Beauvais the tallest structure in the world. It collapsed on Ascension Day 1573, and money for anything more never came. Even now the transept is braced by timber and steel trusses installed in the 1990s, and a state-funded restoration begun in 2022 was still under way in 2026.

Inside, stand at the crossing and look east into the choir: Viollet-le-Duc called it the Parthenon of French Gothic. Then look at the glass, from the 13th to the 16th centuries, with the Renaissance windows of the local Le Prince family of glass painters as highlights. In the north transept is the astronomical clock built by Auguste-Lucien Vérité between 1865 and 1868, a neo-Gothic cabinet of dials and moving figures; nearby hangs a medieval chiming clock from the 14th century that is still in working order. On the way in or out, look at the carved wooden doors of the north and south portals, late Gothic on one side and early Renaissance on the other.

Beauvais itself was almost entirely destroyed by bombing in the Second World War; in June 1940 six bombs fell on the cathedral without exploding. The building came through largely intact, and its figurative windows had been taken down in 1939 and stored away from the city, though the great organ was lost and replaced only in 1979.

Getting there

The cathedral is in the centre of Beauvais, about 0.2 km from the town centre. Beauvais-Tillé Airport (BVA) is 3.3 km away; city bus line 6 links the terminals with the town centre and the railway station in about 15 minutes. Direct regional trains run between Beauvais and Paris Gare du Nord in roughly an hour and a quarter, which makes the cathedral an easy day trip from Paris.

Beauvais Cathedral

Interesting facts

Why it is worth it

Getting there

On these lists

From the encyclopaedia